Insiders and Outsiders

It is worth concluding this chapter with comment on the protocols of admission to the places of influence in the independent sector.

For Independent Sector itself, I understand, some of the most sensitive issues are those of membership. The question of membership raises questions of sectoral balance—how many donors and how many donees—but it also raises all those difficult questions of what constitutes the public interest. The admission of one organization will nullify the possibility of another organization seeking membership. The independent sector organizations that are most strongly ideological are at times like the discordant membership of international organizations. They devote great energy to trying to exclude their opponents from the hall. In more parochial terms, it is like the informal organization of ethnic rivalry: "I wouldn't be caught dead being a member of anything he belongs to" (or any of the variations on that theme).

Apart from the formalities of membership in this particular organization, I wish I knew more about how new ideas emerge and new voices are heard. My impression is that we need to know much more about the processes of social reform: who first perceives a need, who begins to articulate the problem, how organizations form and gain support, how alliances are made, how influence begins to be commanded—or how it is pre-empted or co-opted by other leaders, already established.

Some minority leaders, for example, now take the position, as I understand it, that it is government that is most responsive to their needs. The philanthropic community has itself become an Establishment, locked into dominant organizations that have no interest in sharing their power, influence, or resources.

Other critics argue that the Establishment has abandoned the historic commitment to the poor for an indulgent emphasis on the avocational interests of the rich. There has been a shift from assistance to the poor (a responsibility abandoned to the government) to support for the arts and other cultural interest that are beyond the enjoyment of the poor.

How do the outsiders gain acceptance? Which outsiders?

The process today is probably not different in principle from the past. The dramatic changes are found in the sophistication of the means used to gain attention and influence. "Consciousness raising" is a way of life in a pluralistic democracy like ours. (There is, however, a law of emotional gravity that works here, too: What goes up must come down. Raising consciousness is not the same as keeping it there.) Each new agenda item tends to diminish or even to eliminate an item that had won a place on the earlier agenda.

Who decides who will be replaced? Which insiders must go?

It is in the independent sector that the voices that shape social policy are first heard. That has long been the case—it was clergymen and female volunteers and "people of means and influence" who led the fight against slavery and child labor and for decent treatment of the mentally ill and lepers. More recently, it has been in the independent sector that the conservation movement was transformed into the environmental movement. The environmental movement has had enormous economic impact, often on precisely those economic interest groups within business and labor who saw their interests affected adversely. Ask the tobacco industry about the power of the independent sector; ask the liquor industry.

My personal inference from all this is that not-for-profit organizations have begun to form coalitions around shared values that are beginning to replace the traditional political parties. Independent Sector as a "trans-ideological" organization will soon find itself confronted by ideological competitors. The independent sector may in fact become a competition between two powerful sets of ideas such as those exemplified by the Moral Majority and People for the American Way. The power of the appeal around social philosophies may well prove to be more powerful than that of "interests" as political scientists have defined them in the past. Democrats and Republicans are scattered along with independents and the adherents of minor parties all across those two organizations. People are more likely to vote their single-issue ideological coalition than their political affiliation.

One of the fundamental institutions within the independent sector is the church, and lively debate has recently emerged about the proper demarcation between the jurisdictions of the church and of the state.

Few if any among the single-issue organizations are likely to yield their claims to priority because their priorities threaten the philanthropic system as a whole. It is not in the character of single-issue organizations to accept martyrdom for their ideas in behalf of a common good: Martyrdom is fine, but only in behalf of the idea that they believe to be central.

The most serious threat to the independent sector may, then, prove to be not its weakness, but its strength; not its irrelevance, but its centrality; not its prudent compromise and toleration, but its diffuse but fearful force of conviction.